MEMS

[Burner]

Anybody have some insight on where this field is going?

 

[Sahakiel]

If I remember correctly, MEMS is storing energy in the form of magnetic fields. I remember applications being developed for electric utilities and the army's bevy of lasers, but not much else. Still waiting on superconductors at room temperature.

 

[CSoup]

<< If I remember correctly, MEMS is storing energy in the form of magnetic fields. I remember applications being developed for electric utilities and the army's bevy of lasers, but not much else. Still waiting on superconductors at room temperature. >>



Kinda, not really. It does deal with magnetic fields, but not for the purpose of storing engery. What it is, is building miniture physical devices on a semiconductor chip. MEMS stands for Microelectromechanical Sytems. The movement of these miniture devices is done with magnetic fields. The current working example of a commercial in production MEMS device is the projection chip created by TI. These chips are being used in some projection televisions today. Each chip contains around a million mirrors that can move very quickly. The differing angles of reflections create spots of varying amounts of light projected to the screen.

Here is a page with tons of links to info about MEMS.

 

[Burner]

cool thanks for the link.
Anybody have any novel ideas that would be interesting to try using MEMS? I think I saw somewhere that somebody made a motor out of them, which is pretty neat.

 

[Sahakiel]

Cool. Learn something new everyday.
Can't wait to see micromachines in my mouth cleaning house.
But, then, I wonder if silicon is digestible.

 

[kylef]

MEMS technology is already in use in consumer equipment. For example, have you ever seen those small color screen projectors from Eiki, Infocus, Epson, et al?

The "DLP" chip technology that's inside of them is a MEMS-based device produced by Texas Instruments composed of thousands of tiny movable mirrors individually controlled by electrical fields. You can see more about it from Texas Instruments' site here.

A colleague here at Duke is working with microfluidic systems (lots of research is going on at other universities also). The main idea here is that miniature pumps can be built onto silicon devices powered by small amounts of electricity. These pumps can administer precise doses of medicine and/or hormones and can be implanted into various parts of the body.

 

[Burner]

Yeah I've seen that projector, its pretty cool. I think that they also make tuning stuff, and accelerometers out of it, just wondering if anything really exciting is going to come out of the field in the future, because it definitely has possibilities.
The pump sounds really neat, how far along is it?

 

[da loser]

here's a company that makes mems, they even supply a small database of previous designs you can use to incorporate into your own design. lots of different examples, you could retrieve them, but you need cad software to view the files. mems examples I'm not sure on that pump, but I've seen a few posters with actual operation of a pump used in devices to mix chemicals together.

 

[Superdoopercooper]

I did some periphery work with a company that makes accelerometer MEMS. They are used as airbag sensors, if I rmemeber corectly. They had 1-D models, and 2-D models. Kinda cool.

The TI DLP MEMS chips is WAY cooler... of course, I'm a home theater nut, so of course I'd think stuff that goes into Hi-res projection systems is cool.

 

[kylef]

I apologize: after re-reading my earlier post, I would seem to imply that such microfluidic pumps are already finished and ready to be implanted in human beings. Of course, they are not, although they have successfully demonstrated working pumps that, among other things, have mixed chemicals together as Da Loser pointed out. Sorry if I confused anyone

Also, by saying "colleage" I may have given everyone the impression that I am some sort of professor or something. I am not: I am but a lowly graduate student...

 

[EmMayEx]

Here is the latest MEMs photo that I've seen in at least three different semiconductor trade publications in the past week. It looks a lot more sophisticated than previous micron sized gear trains and incorporates a chain drive.

Most of the MEMs applications I've seen are optoelectronic switching (like the TI micromirror array chip) devices for fiber optic switching networks. There are also some biomedical applications. I get the impression that MEMs is still in search of a "killer app" to put the field on the same level as the microelectronics industry. At first glance it seems like there should be a lot of applciations for this technology but I think there is some development work to do before it becomes as ubiquitous as the silicon semiconductor circuit.

Max L.